Masters of Corporate Venture Capital: Collective Wisdom from 50 VCs Best Practices for Corporate Venturing How to Access Startup Innovation & How to Get Funded

CVCs like Citi Ventures it is actually easy to make money. All they need to do is find out which startups Citibank IT is going to buy from and invest in those companies. The moment Citi becomes a customer then every other bank will become a customer, the startups they invest in will go up at least 4x in value and the CVC becomes an actual line of b

If the CVC program is creating a true pipeline for the corp dev unit then the CVC program is moving the needle, but investments need to drive the ecosystem, partnerships, and M&A.

In almost all cases I think making a financial return for a corporate is less important than a strategic return.

We maximized our optionality value with the smallest amount of capital. We were never trying to make a financial return, but at the same time were not donating money.

The key take away was to invest the smallest check possible that would give us access to notification rights, relationships and information.

trends that helped inform our strategy.

In all cases, the goal of the investment program was to deploy the smallest amount of capital into the widest set of companies that still enabled us to achieve our strategic goals. Notification rights and access to information allowed us to acquire extraordinary insight into key companies and

3)Invest a small check into any company that we might acquire at some point in the future – CVC with a purpose of feeding the M&A pipeline. For us CVC was tied at the hip to corp dev.

Sourcing good deals that will make money is the easy part. Identifying the correct companies that can be relevant to the core business of the corporate is also not the most challenging part. The devil is in the details after making the investment about how you drive that as a partnership, test solutions, implement pilots as part of your overall sol

Create a CVC that can operate with high confidence.